Do Not Go to Jail

Last year, noting that not a single high-level executive had been successfully prosecuted in connection with collapse of the national economy in 2008, I asked why more real crooks don’t go to jail. Jed S. Rakoff takes up that topic in a recent piece in the New York Review of Books in which he asks why, while the Department of Justice has never taken the position that all the top executives involved in the events leading up to the financial crisis were innocent, it keeps offering one or another excuse for not criminally prosecuting them.

It won’t make you any less angry, if angry you are, but you’ll have a firmer grasp of what you ought to be angry about.